In this single-volume history of the United States, the Wolfson Prize–winning author of In Command of History employs Thomas Jefferson's vision of the country as a great "empire of liberty" as a key to the American saga. David Reynolds examines how the anti-imperialist nation of 1776 became the greatest superpower in the world, while asking difficult questions about the contradictory nature of American prosperity, built on slave labor and the dispossession of Native Americans.

"Let us not mince words ... this is the best one-volume history of the United States ever written.... At least on the face of it, no single mind can master this mountain of material, avoid the almost-inevitable factual blunders, negotiate the long-standing scholarly controversies, and control the narrative in clear and at-times-lyrical prose. But that is precisely what Reynolds has done ... [in this] remarkable tour of the American past."—National Interest

"Cambridge historian Reynolds captures the sprawling chronicle of a nation forged from the fires of revolution, populated by immigrants and constantly evolving politically and culturally. Reynolds constructs his story around the richly, sometimes fatally ambiguous themes of empire, liberty and faith in the nation's development. The American colonists who overthrew an imperial government themselves created an empire based on manifest destiny and removal of Native Americans to reservations. As for liberty, Reynolds reminds us that it was built on the backs of black slaves, but white Americans were free from the intrusion of the federal government in their personal lives until the New Deal, which dramatically changed the nature of American liberty. The development of religious denominations in America contributed moral fervor to many progressive causes, such as temperance, and animated America in the cold war and George W. Bush's war on terror."—Publishers Weekly